The present invention concerns media adapted for injection into living bodies, e.g. for the purpose of ultrasonic echography and, more particularly, injectable liquid compositions comprising microbubbles of air or physiologically acceptable gases as stable dispersions or suspensions in an aqueous liquid carrier. These compositions are mostly usable as contrast agents in ultrasonic echography to image the inside of blood-stream vessels and other cavities of living beings, e.g. human patients and animals. Other uses however are also contemplated as disclosed hereafter.
The invention also comprises dry compositions which, upon admixing with an aqueous carrier liquid, will generate the foregoing sterile suspension of microbubbles thereafter usable as contrast agent for ultrasonic echography and other purposes.
It is well known that microbodies like microspheres or microglobules of air or a gas, e.g. microbubbles or microballoons, suspended in a liquid are exceptionally efficient ultrasound reflectors for echography. In this disclosure the term of xe2x80x9cmicrobubblexe2x80x9d specifically designates air or gas globules in suspension in a liquid which generally results from the introduction therein of air or a gas in divided form, the liquid preferably also containing surfactants or tensides to control the surface properties thereof and the stability of the bubbles. More specifically, one may consider that the internal volume of the microbubbles is limited by the gas/liquid interface, or in other words, the microbubbles are only bounded by a rather evanescent envelope involving the molecules of the liquid and surfactant loosely bound at the gas to liquid junction boundary.
In contrast, the term of xe2x80x9cmicrocapsulexe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cmicroballoonxe2x80x9d designates preferably air or gas bodies with a material boundary or envelope formed of molecules other than that of the liquid of suspension, e.g. a polymer membrane wall. Both microbubbles and microballoons are useful as ultrasonic contrast agents. For instance injecting into the blood-stream of living bodies suspensions of gas microbubbles or microballoons (in the range of 0.5 to 10 xcexcm) in a carrier liquid will strongly reinforce ultrasonic echography imaging, thus aiding in the visualization of internal organs. Imaging of vessels and internal organs can strongly help in medical diagnosis, for instance for the detection of cardiovascular and other diseases.
The formation of suspensions of microbubbles in an injectable liquid carrier suitable for echography can follow various routes. For instance in DE-A-3529195 (Max-Planck Gesell.), there is disclosed a technique for generating 0.5-50 xcexcm bubbles in which an aqueous emulsified mixture containing a water soluble polymer, an oil and mineral salts is forced back and forth, together with a small amount of air, from one syringe into another through a small opening. Here, mechanical forces are responsible for the formation of bubbles in the liquid.
M. W. Keller. et al. (J. Ultrasound Med. 5 (1986). 439-8) have reported subjecting to ultrasonic cavitation under atmospheric pressure solutions containing high concentrations of solutes such as dextrose, Renografin-76, Iopamidol (an X-ray contrast agent), and the like. There the air is driven into the solution by the energy of cavitation.
Other techniques rely on the shaking of a carrier liquid in which air containing microparticles have been incorporated, said carrier liquid usually containing, as stabilizers, viscosity enhancing agents, e.g. water soluble polypeptides or carbohydrates and/or surfactants. It is effectively admitted that the stability of the microbubbles against decay or escape to the atmosphere is controlled by the viscosity and surface properties of the carrier liquid. The air or gas in the microparticles can consist of inter-particle or intra-crystalline entrapped gas, as well as surface adsorbed gas, or gas produced by reactions with the carrier liquid, usually aqueous. All this is fully described for instance in EP-A-52.575 (Ultra Med. Inc.) in which there are used aggregates of 1-50 xcexcm particles of carbohydrates (e.g. galactose, maltose, sorbitol, gluconic acid, sucrose, glucose end the like) in aqueous solutions of glycols or polyglycols, or other water soluble polymers.
Also, in EP-A-123.235 and 122.624 (Schering, see also EP-A-320.433) use is made of air trapped in solids. For instance, 122.624 claims a liquid carrier contrast Composition for ultrasonic echography containing microparticles of a solid surfactant, the latter being optionally combined with microparticles of a non-surfactant. As explained in this document, the formation of air bubbles in the solution results from the release of the air adsorbed on the surface of the particles, or trapped within the particle lattice, or caught between individual particles, this being so when the particles are agitated with the liquid carrier.
EP-A-131.540 (Schering) also discloses the preparation of microbubbles suspensions in which a stabilized injectable carrier liquid, e.g. a physiological aqueous solution of salt, or a solution of a sugar like maltose, dextrose, lactose or galactose, without viscosity enhancer, is mixed with microparticles (in the 0.1 to 1 xcexcm range) of the same sugars containing entrapped air. In order that the suspension of bubbles can develop within the liquid carrier, the foregoing documents recommend that both liquid and solid components be violently agitated together under sterile conditions; the agitation of both components together is performed for a few seconds and, once made, the suspension must then be used immediately, i.e. it should be injected within 5-10 minutes for echographic measurements; this indicates that the bubbles in the suspensions are not longlived and one practical problem with the use of microbubbles suspensions for injection is lack of stability with time. The present invention fully remedies this drawback.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,466,442 (Schering), there is disclosed a series of different techniques for producing suspensions of gas microbubbles in a liquid carrier using (a) a solution of, a tenside (surfactant) in a carrier liquid (aqueous) and (b) a solution of a viscosity enhancer as stabilizer. For generating the bubbles, the techniques used there include forcing at high velocity a mixture of (a), (b) and air through a small aperture; or injecting (a) into (b) shortly before use together with a physiologically acceptable gas; or adding an acid to (a) and a carbonate to (b), both components being mixed together Just before use and the acid reacting with the carbonate to generate CO2 bubbles: or adding an over-pressurized gas to a mixture of (a) and (b) under storage, said gas being released into microbubbles at the time when the mixture is used for injection.
The tensides used in component (a): of U.S. Pat. No. 4,466,442 comprise lecithins; esters and ethers of fatty acids and fatty alcohols with polyoxyethylene and polyoxyethylated polyols like sorbitol, glycols and glycerol, cholesterol; and polyoxy-ethylene-polyoxypropylene polymers. The viscosity raising and stabilizing compounds include for instance mono- and polysaccharides (glucose, lactose, sucrose, dextran, sorbitol); polyols, e.g. glycerol, polyglycols; and polypeptides like proteins, gelatin, oxypolygelatin, plasma protein and the like.
In a typical preferred example of this document, equivalent volumes of (a) a 0.5% by weight aqueous solution of Pluronic(copyright) F-68 (a polyoxypropylene-polyoxyethylene polymer) and (b) a 10% lactose solution are vigorously shaken together under sterile conditions (closed vials) to provide a suspension of microbubbles ready for use as an ultrasonic contrast agent and lasting for at least 2 minutes. About 50% of the bubbles had a size below 50 xcexcm.
Although the achievements of the prior art have merit, they suffer from several drawbacks which strongly limit their practical use by doctors and hospitals, namely their relatively short life-span (which makes test reproducibility difficult), relative low initial bubble concentration (the number of bubbles rarely exceeds 104-105 bubbles/ml and the count decreases rapidly with time) and poor reproducibility of the initial bubble count from test to test (which also makes comparisons difficult). Also it is admitted that for efficiently imaging certain organs, e.g. the left heart, bubbles smaller than 50 xcexcm, preferably in the range of 0.5-10 xcexcm, are required: with longer bubbles, there are risks of clots and consecutive emboly.
Furthermore, the compulsory presence of solid microparticles or high concentrations of electrolytes and other relatively inert solutes in the carrier liquid may be undesirable physiologically in some cases. Finally, the suspensions are totally unstable under storage and cannot be marketed as such; hence great skill is required to prepare the microbubbles at the right moment just before use.
Of course there exists stable suspensions of microcapsules, i.e. microballoons with a solid, air-sealed rigid polymeric membrane which perfectly resist for long storage periods in suspension, which have been developed to remedy this shortcoming (see for instance K. J. Widder, EP-A-324.938); however the properties of microcapsules in which a gas is entrapped inside solid membrane vesicles essentially differ from that of the gas microbubbles of the present invention and belong to a different kind of art; for instance while the gas microbubbles discussed here will simply escape or dissolve in the blood-stream when the stabilizers in the carrier liquid are excreted or metabolized, the solid polymer material forming the walls of the aforementioned micro-balloons must eventually be disposed of by the organism being tested which may impose a serious afterburden upon it. Also capsules with solid, non-elastic membrane may break irreversibly under variations of pressure.
The composition of the present invention, as defined in claim 1, fully remedies the aforementioned pitfalls.
The term xe2x80x9clamellar formxe2x80x9d defining the condition of at least a portion of the surfactant or surfactants of the present composition indicates that the surfactants, in strong contrast with the microparticles of the prior art (for instance EP-A-123.235), are in the form of thin films involving one or more molecular layers (in laminate form). Converting film forming surfactants into lamellar form can easily be done for instance by high pressure homogenization or by sonication under acoustical or ultrasonic frequencies. In this connection, it should be pointed out that the existence of liposomes is a well known and useful illustration of cases in which surfactants, more particularly lipids, are in lamellar form.
Liposome solutions are aqueous suspensions of microscopic vesicles, generally spherically shaped, which hold substances encapsulated therein. These vesicles are usually formed of one or more concentrically arranged molecular layers (lamellae) of amphipatic compounds, i.e. compounds having a lipophobic hydrophilic moiety and a lipophilic hydrophobic moiety. See for instance xe2x80x9cLiposome Methodologyxe2x80x9d, Ed. L. D. Leserman et al, Inserm 136, May 2-8, 1982). Many surfactants or tensides, including lipids, particularly phospholipids, can be laminarized to correspond to this kind of structure. In this invention, one preferably uses the lipids commonly used for making liposomes, for instance the lecithins and other tensides disclosed in more detail hereafter, but this does in no way preclude the use of other surfactants provided they can be formed into layers or films.
It is important to note that no confusion should be made between the present invention and the disclosure of Ryan (U.S. Pat. No. 4,900,540) reporting the use of air or gas filled liposomes for echography. In this method Ryan encapsulates air or a gas within liposomic vesicles: in embodiments of the present invention microbubbles or air or a gas are formed in a suspension of liposomes (i.e. liquid filled liposomes) and the liposomes apparently stabilize the microbubbles. In Ryan, the air is inside the liposomes, which means that within the bounds of the presently used terminology, the air filled liposomes of Ryan belong to the class of microballoons and not to that of the microbubbles of the present invention.
Practically, to achieve the suspensions of microbubbles according to the invention, one may start with liposomes suspensions or solutions prepared by any technique reported in the prior art, with the obvious difference that in the present case the liposomic vesicles are preferably xe2x80x9cunloadedxe2x80x9d, i.e. they do not need to keep encapsulated therein any foreign material other than the liquid of suspension as is normally the object of classic liposomes. Hence, preferably, the liposomes of the present invention will contain an aqueous phase identical or similar to the aqueous phase of the solution itself. Then air or a gas is introduced into the liposome solution so that a suspension of microbubbles will form, said suspension being stabilized by the presence of the surfactants in lamellar form. Notwithstanding, the material making the liposome walls can be modified within the scope of the present invention, for instance by covalently grafting thereon foreign molecules designed for specific purposes as will be explained later.
The preparation of liposome solutions has been abundently discussed in many publications, e.g. U.S. Pat. No. 4,224,179 and WO-A-88/09165 and all citations mentioned therein. This prior art is used here as reference for exemplifying the various methods suitable for converting film forming tensides into lamellar form. Another basic reference by H. C. Woodle and D. Papahadjopoulos is found in xe2x80x9cMethods in Enzymologyxe2x80x9d 171 (1989), 193.
For instance, in a method disclosed in D. A. Tyrrell et al, Biochimica and Biophysica Acta 457 (1976), 259-302, a mixture of a lipid and an aqueous liquid carrier is subjected to violent agitation and thereafter sonicated at acoustic or ultrasonic frequencies at room or elevated temperature. In the present invention, it has been found that sonication-without agitation is convenient. Also, an apparatus for making liposomes, a high pressure homogenizer such as the Microfluidizer(copyright), which can be purchased from Microfluidics Corp., Newton, Mass. 02164 USA, can be used advantageously. Large volumes of liposome solutions can be prepared with this apparatus under pressures which can reach 600-1200 bar.
In another method, according to the teaching of GB-A-2,134,869 (Squibb), microparticles (10 xcexcm or less) of a hydrosoluble carrier solid (NaCl, sucrose, lactose and other carbohydrates) are coated with an amphipatic agent; the dissolution of the coated carrier in an aqueous phase will yield liposomic vesicles. In GB-A-2,135,647 insoluble particles, e.g. glass or resin microbeads are coated by moistening in a solution of a lipid in an organic solvent followed by removal of the solvent by evaporation. The lipid coated microbeads are thereafter contacted with an aqueous carrier phase, whereby liposomic vesicles will form in that carrier phase.
The introduction of air or gas into a liposome solution in order to form therein a suspension of microbubbles can be effected by usual means, inter alia by injection, that is, forcing said air or gas through tiny orifices into the liposome solution, or simply dissolving the gas in the solution by applying pressure and thereafter suddenly releasing the pressure. Another way is to agitate or sonicate the liposome solution in the presence of air or an entrappable gas. Also one can generate the formation of a gas within the solution of liposomes itself, for instance by a gas releasing chemical reaction, e.g. decomposing a dissolved carbonate or bicarbonate by acid. The same effect can be obtained by dissolving under pressure a low boiling liquid, for instance butane, in the aqueous phase and thereafter allowing said liquid to boll by suddenly releasing the pressure.
Notwithstanding, an advantageous method is to contact the dry surfactant in lamellar or thin film form with air or an adsorbable or entrappable gas before introducing said surfactant into the liquid carrier phase. In this regard, the method can be derived from the technique disclosed in GB-A-2,135,647, i.e. solid microparticles or beads are dipped in a solution of a film forming surfactant (or mixture of surfactants) in a volatile solvent, after which the solvent is evaporated and the beads are left in contact with air (or an adsorbable gas) for a time sufficient for that air to become superficially bound to the surfactant layer. Thereafter, the beads coated with air filled surfactant are put into a carrier liquid, usually water with or without additives, whereby air bubbles will develop within the liquid, by gentle mixing, violent agitation being entirely unnecessary. Then the solid beads can be separated, for instance by filtration, from the microbubble suspension which is remarkably stable with time.
Heedless to say that, instead of insoluble beads or spheres, one may use as supporting particles water soluble materials like that disclosed in GB-A-2,134,869 (carbohydrates or hydrophilic polymers), whereby said supporting particles will eventually dissolve and final separation of a solid becomes unnecessary. Furthermore in this case, the material of the particles can be selected to eventually act as stabilizer or viscosity enhancer wherever desired.
In a variant of the method, one may also start with dehydrated liposomes, i.e. liposomes which have been prepared normally by means of conventional techniques in the form of aqueous solutions and thereafter dehydrated by usual means, e.g. such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,229,360 also incorporated herein as reference. One of the methods for dehydrating liposomes recommended in this reference is freeze-drying (lyophilization), i.e. the liposome solution is frozen and dried by evaporation (sublimation) under reduced pressure. Prior to effecting freeze-drying, a hydrophilic stabilizer compound is dissolved in the solution, for instance a carbohydrate like lactose or sucrose or a hydrophilic polymer like dextran, starch, PVP, PVA and the like. This is useful in the present invention since such hydrophilic compounds also aid in homogenizing the microbubbles size distribution and enhance stability under storage. Actually making very dilute aqueous solutions (0.1-10% by weight) of freeze-dried liposomes stabilized with, for instance, a 5:1 to 10:1 weight ratio of lactose to lipid enables to produce aqueous microbubbles suspensions counting 108-109 microbubbles/ml (size distribution mainly 0.5-10 xcexcm) which are stable for at least a month (and probably much longer) without significant observable change. And this is obtained by simple dissolution of the air-stored dried liposomes without shaking or any violent agitation. Furthermore, the freeze-drying technique under reduced pressure is very useful because it permits, after drying, to restore the pressure above the dried liposomes with any entrappable gas, i.e. nitrogen, CO2, argon, methane. FREON (a gaseous fluorocarbon or chlorofluorocarbon.) etc., whereby after dissolution of the liposomes processed under such conditions suspensions of microbubbles containing the above gases are obtained.
Microbubbles suspensions formed by applying gas pressure on a dilute solution of laminated lipids in water (0.1-10% by weight) and thereafter suddenly releasing the pressure have an even higher bubble concentration, e.g. In the order of 1010-1011 bubbles/ml. However, the average bubble size is somewhat above 10 xcexcm, e.g. in the 10-50 xcexcm range. In this case, bubble size distribution can be narrowed by centrifugation and layer decantation.
The tensides or surfactants which are convenient in this invention can be selected from all amphipatic compounds capable of forming stable films in the presence of water and gases. The preferred surfactants which can be laminarized include the lecithins (phosphatidyl-choline) and other phospholipids, inter alia phosphatidic acid (PA), phosphatidyl-inositol phosphatidyl-ethanolamine (PE), phosphatidyl-serine (PS), phosphatidyl-glycerol (PG), cardiolipin (CL), sphingomyelins, the plasmogens, the cerebrosides, etc. Examples of suitable lipids are the phospholipids in general, for example, natural lecithins, such as egg lecithin or soya bean lecithin, or synthetic lecithins such as saturated synthetic lecithins, for example, dimyristoyl phosphatidyl choline, dipalmitoyl phosphatidyl choline or distearoyl phosphatidyl choline or unsaturated synthetic lecithins, such as dioleyl phosphatidyl choline or dilinoleyl phosphatidyl choline, with egg lecithin or soya bean lecithin being preferred. Additives like cholesterol and other substances (see below) can be added to one or more of the foregoing lipids in proportions ranging from zero to 50% by weight.
Such additives may include other surfactants that can be used in admixture with the film forming surfactants and most of which are recited in the prior art discussed in the introduction of this specification. For instance, one may cite free fatty acids, esters of fatty acids with polyoxyalkylene compounds like polyoxypropylene glycol and polyoxyethylene glycol; ethers of fatty alcohols with polyoxyalkylene glycols; esters of fatty acids with polyoxyalkylated sorbitan; soaps; glycerol-polyalkylene stearate; glycerol-polyoxyethylene ricinoleate; homo- and copolymers of polyalkylene glycols; polyethoxylated soya-oil and castor oil as well as hydrogenated derivatives; ethers and esters of sucrose or other carbohydrates with fatty acids, fatty alcohols, these being optionally polyoxyakylated mono-, di- and triglycerides of saturated or unsaturated fatty acids; glycerides of soya-oil and sucrose. The amount of the non-film forming tensides or surfactants can be up to 50% by weight of the total amount of surfactants in the composition but is preferably between zero and 30%.
The total amount of surfactants relative to the aqueous carrier liquid is best in the range of 0.01 to 25% by weight but quantities in the range 0.5-5% are advantageous because one always tries to keep the amount of active substances in an injectable solution as low as possible, this being to minimize the introduction of foreign materials into living beings even when they are harmless and physiologically compatible.
Further optional additives to the surfactants include:
a) substances which are known to provide a negative charge on liposomes, for example, phosphatidic acid, phosphatidylglycerol or dicetyl phosphate;
b) substances known to provide a positive charge, for example, stearyl amine, or stearyl amine acetate;
c) substances known to affect the physical properties of the lipid films in a more desirable way: for example, capro-lactam and/or sterols such as cholesterol, ergosterol, phytosterol, sitosterol, sitosterol pyroglutamate, 7-dehydro-cholesterol or lanosterol, may affect lipid films rigidity;
d) substances known to have antioxidant properties to improve the chemical stability of the components in the suspensions, such as tocopherol, propyl gallate, ascorbyl palmitate, or butylated hydroxy toluene.
The aqueous carrier in this invention is mostly water with possibly small quantities of physiologically compatible liquids such as isopropanol, glycerol, hexanol and the like (see for instance EP-A-52.575). In general the amount of the organic hydrosoluble liquids will not exceed 5-10% by weight.
The present composition may also contain dissolved or suspended therein hydrophilic compounds and polymers defined generally under the name of viscosity enhancers or stabilizers. Although the presence of such compounds is not compulsory for ensuring stability to the air or gas bubbles: with time in the present dispersions, they are advantageous to give some kind of xe2x80x9cbodyxe2x80x9d to the solutions. When desired, the upper concentrations of such additives when totally innocuous can be very high, for instance up to 80-90% by weight of solution with Iopamidol and other iodinated X-ray contrast agents. However with other viscosity enhancers like for instance sugars, e.g. lactose, sucrose, maltose, galactose, glucose, etc. or hydrophilic polymers like starch, dextran, polyvinyl alcohol, polyvinyl-pyrrolidone, dextrin, xanthan or partly hydrolyzed cellulose oligomers, as well as proteins and polypeptides, the concentrations are best between about 1 and 40% by weight, a range.of about 5-20% being preferred.
Like in the prior art, the injectable compositions of this invention can also contain physiologically acceptable electrolytes; an example is an isotonic solution of salt.
The present invention naturally also includes dry storable pulverulent blends which can generate the present microbubble containing dispersions upon simple admixing with water or an aqueous carrier phase. Preferably such dry blends or formulations will contain all solid ingredients necessary to provide the desired microbubbles suspensions upon the simple addition of water, i.e. principally the surfactants in lamellar form containing trapped or adsorbed therein the air or gas required for microbubble formation, and accessorily the other non-film forming surfactants, the viscosity enhancers and stabilizers and possibly other optional additives. As said before, the air or gas entrappment by the laminated surfactants occurs by simply exposing said surfactants to the air (or gas) at room or super-atmospheric pressure for a time sufficient to cause said air or gas to become entrapped within the surfactant. This period of time can be very short, e.g. In the order of a few seconds to a few minutes although over-exposure, i.e. storage under air or under a gaseous atmosphere is in no way harmful. What is important is that air can well contact as much as possible of the available surface of the laminated surfactant, i.e. the dry material should preferably be in a xe2x80x9cfluffyxe2x80x9d light flowing condition. This is precisely this condition which results from the freeze-drying, of an aqueous solution of liposomes and hydrophilic agent as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,229,360.
In general, the weight ratio of surfactants to hydrophilic viscosity enhancer in the dry formulations will be in the order of 0.1:10 to 10:1, the further optional ingredients, if any, being present in a ratio not exceeding 50% relative to the total of surfactants plus viscosity enhancers.
The dry blend formulations of this invention can be prepared by very simple methods. As seen before, one preferred method is to first prepare an aqueous solution in which the film forming lipids are laminarized, for instance by sonication, or using any conventional technique commonly used in the liposome field, this solution also containing the other desired additives, i.e. viscosity enhancers, non-film forming surfactants, electrolyte, etc., and thereafter freeze drying to a free flowable powder which is then stored in the presence of air or an entrappable gas.
The dry blend can be kept for any period of time in the dry state and sold as such. For putting it into use, i.e. for preparing a gas or air microbubble suspension for ultrasonic imaging, one simply dissolves a known weight of the dry pulverulent formulation in a sterile aqueous phase, e.g. water or a physiologically acceptable medium. The amount of powder will depend on the desired concentration of bubbles in the injectable product, a count of about 108-109 bubbles/ml being generally that from making a 5-20% by weight solution of the powder in water. But naturally this figure is only indicative, the amount of bubbles being essentially dependent on the amount of air or gas trapped during manufacture of the dry powder. The manufacturing steps being under control, the dissolution of the dry formulations will provide microbubble suspensions with well reproducible counts.
The resulting microbubble suspensions (bubble in the 0.5-10 xcexcm range) are extraordinarily stable with time, the count originally measured at start staying unchanged or only little changed for weeks and even months; the only observable change is a kind of segregation, the larger bubbles (around 10 xcexcm) tending to rise faster than the small ones.
It has also been found that the microbubbles suspensions of this invention can be diluted with very little loss in the number of microbubbles to be expected from dilution, i.e. even in the case of high dilution ratios, e.g. 1/102 to 1/104, the microbubble count reduction accurately matches with the dilution ratio. This indicates that the stability of the bubbles depends on the surfactant in lamellar form rather than on the presence of stabilizers or viscosity enhancers like in the prior art. This property is advantageous in regard to imaging test reproducibility as the bubbles are not affected by dilution with blood upon injection into a patient.
Another advantage of the bubbles of this invention versus the microcapsules of the prior art surrounded by a rigid but breakable membrane which may irreversibly fracture under stress is that when the present suspensions are subject to sudden pressure changes, the present bubbles will momentarily contract elastically and then resume their original shape when the pressure is released. This is important in clinical practice when the microbubbles are pumped through the heart and therefore are exposed to alternating pressure pulses.
The reasons why the microbubbles in this invention are so stable are not clearly understood. Since to prevent bubble escape the buoyancy forces should equilibrate with the retaining forces due to friction, i.e. to viscosity, it is theorized that the bubbles are probably surrounded by the laminated surfactant. Whether this laminar surfactant is in the form of a continuous or discontinuous membrane, or even as closed spheres attached to the microbubbles, is for the moment unknown but under investigation. However the lack of a detailed knowledge of the phenomena presently involved does not preclude full industrial operability of the present invention.
The bubble suspensions of the present invention are also useful in other medical/diagnostic applications where it is desirable to target the stabilized microbubbles to specific sites in the body following their injection, for instance to thrombi present in blood vessels, to atherosclerotic lesions (plaques) in arteries, to tumor cells, as well as for the diagnosis of altered surfaces of body cavities, e.g. ulceration sites in the stomach or tumors of the bladder. For this, one can bind monoclonal antibodies tailored by genetic engineering, antibody fragments or polypeptides designed to mimic antibodies, bioadhesive polymers, lectins and other site-recognizing molecules to the surfactant layer stabilizing the microbubbles. Thus monoclonal antibodies can be bound to phospholipid bilayers by the method described by L. D. Leserman, P. Machy and J. Barbet (xe2x80x9cLiposome Technology vol. IIIxe2x80x9d p. 29 ed. by G. Gregoriadis, CRC Press 1984). In another approach a palmitoyl antibody is first synthesized and then incorporated in phospholipid bilayers following L. Huang, A. Huang and S. J. Kennel (xe2x80x9cLiposome Technology vol. IIIxe2x80x9d p. 51 ed. by G. Gregoriadis, CRC Press 1984). Alternatively, some of the phospholipids used in the present invention can be carefully selected in order to obtain preferential uptake in organs or tissues or increased half-life in blood. Thus GM1 gangliosides- or phosphatidylinositol-containing liposomes, preferably in addition to cholesterol, will lead to increased half-lifes in blood after intravenous administration in analogy with A. Gabizon, D. Papahadjopoulos, Proc. Natl Acad. Sci USA 85 (1988) 6949.
The gases in the microbubbles of the present invention can include, in addition to current innocuous physiologically acceptable gases like CO2, nitrogen, N2O, methane, butane. FREON (a gaseous fluorocarbon or chlorofluorocarbon.) and mixtures thereof, radioactive gases such as 133Xe or 81Kr are of particular interest in nuclear medicine for blood circulation measurements, for lung scintigraphy etc.
The following Examples illustrate the invention on a practical stand point.
Echogenicity measurements were performed in a pulsexe2x80x94echo system made of a plexiglas specimen holder (diameter 30 mm) and a transducer holder immersed in a constant, temperature water bath, a pulser-receiver (Accutron M30105) with for the receiving part an external pre-amplifier with a fixed gain of 40 dB and an internal amplifier with adjustable gain from xe2x88x9240 to +40 dB. A 10 MHz low-pass filter was inserted in the receiving part to improve the signal to noise ratio. The A/D board in the IBM PC was a Sonotek STR 832. Measurements were carried out at 2.25, 3.5, 5 and 7.5 MHz.